Cattell's 16 Personality Factors

Last updated:
27 Jul 2004

Cattell's 16 Personality Factors

Cattell (1905 - present) viewed language is a useful source of
information about personality. A quality described by many words, he
figured, was likely to be a more important part of personality. Cattell
used this lexical criterion in determining his original list of trait
names.

Cattell narrowed Allport and Odbert’s (1936) listing of 17,000+ words
down to 4,500 words and then narrowed these down further to 171 trait
names. Cattell then collected self-ratings on these words and then
conducted factor analysis. He used both observer and behavioural data.
The result was his 16 personality factors (16
PF):